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Upcoming: Kirra, a language-independent API for business applications

What do NakedObjects, Apache Isis, Restful Objects, OpenXava, JMatter, Tynamo, Roma, and Cloudfier have in common?

These frameworks and platforms allow developers to focus on expressing all they know about a business domain in the form of a rich domain model. And they all support or enable automatically generating interfaces based on the application’s domain model that make the entire functionality of the application accessible to end users, without requiring any effort on designing a user interface. They can also often auto-generate a functional (usually REST) API for non-human actors.

However, each of those frameworks/platforms implement automatic UI or API generation independently, against their own proprietary metamodels – for each UI and API technology supported. So while Cloudfier supports a Qooxdoo client, Isis supports a Wicket viewer and a JQuery viewer, OpenXava seems to have a JQuery/DWR UI and so on.

This is the motivation for Kirra: Kirra aims to decouple the interface renderers from the technologies used for creating domain-driven applications, promoting the proliferation of high-quality generic UI and API renderers that can be used across domain-driven development frameworks, or even if your application is not built with a domain-driven framework.

But what is Kirra?

Kirra is a minimalistic language-independent API specification to expose functionality of a business application in a business and technology agnostic way.

Essentially, Kirra provides a simple model for exposing metadata and data for business applications, no matter how they were implemented, enabling generic clients that have full access to the functionality exposed by those applications.

Watch this space for more details and the first release, planned for later this month.